Implications of Colored Service

It is important to emphasize the implications of the number
of blacks fighting for the South, as it illuminates the
main reason for controversy. Those promoting a large number
of black Southern combatants say that this has wide-ranging
consequences for the way the antebellum South is viewed.
Kennedy and Kennedy are hardly defenders of reconciliation,
but they deliver, in their neo-Confederate The South Was
Right! a blunt example. When writing that with the accounts
of blacks fighting for the Confederacy, they contend,

"how can anyone continue to believe the myth that Southern
blacks were longing for Yankee-induced freedom? How can
anyone continue to accept the Yankee Abolitionist view of a
hate-filled and evil South? The truth is that life in the
Old South was very different from that which the
'politically correct' historians would have us believe.
Yes, there are many blacks who fought for the South."(39)

Richard Rollins adds to this line of thought, asserting
that "to imagine the Confederate armies without black
Southerners in their ranks is to perpatuate the ahistorical
myth of the South as a compartmentalized society."(40) In
their eyes, blacks served the Cause that was Lost; in
actuality, they serve the mythical Lost Cause of the South.

The more extrapolated arguments are easily dismantled when
confronted by a variety of sources. There is the generally
accepted number of 200,000 blacks serving on the side of
the North, a number that pales its Confederate counterpart
and the consequential conclusion that the Old South was a
paradise for slaves. In addition, a systematic analysis of
the 1930s Slave Narratives teaches one that black and white
were indeed "divided into hostile camps" remeniscent of a
"caste system," and that only 3 percent of interviewed
slaves professed a genuine affection of their master.(41)

If the more extreme statements are brittle in the face of
counter-arguments, the more general notion that blacks in
the South did not constitute a monolithic entity may prove
much more persistent, just as one should cautiously speak
of "the South"-one need only consider the different
motivations to secede between two states as close as North
and South Carolina.(42) The number of slaves who did offer
their service, insignificant though they seem, could
indicate that there were different factions of blacks in
the South, which would complicate the common notion of
slavery in the antebellum.